The Halloween 2023 StoryScream: things to play and watch this spooky season

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By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

October is a time for spooky things, and you can’t really go wrong with the classics: watching some Friday the 13th or playing a little Silent Hill. But every year, there’s also a steady stream of new horror that sometimes gets overlooked, whether it’s a movie, game, or TV show. Here, we’ve collected some of the most interesting releases so far in 2023, from streaming movies destined to become cult hits to a surprisingly large number of big-budget horror game remakes. If you’re looking for something outside of the classic Halloween canon to watch or play in October — or anytime, really — here are some good places to start.

Sep 28

Charles Pulliam-Moore

Netflix’s first Castlevania animated series excelled by balancing its quiet, beautifully performed moments of human drama with explosive and artful action set pieces dazzling enough to evoke the feeling of playing Konami’s classic side-scroller for the first time. Despite the first show’s strengths, its regular issues with pacing and effectively cultivating characters from season to season made the idea of Netflix keeping the vampiric daddy issues ball rolling with Castlevania: Nocturne — a new spinoff series from executive producer Clive Bradley and co-directors Sam Deats and Adam Deats — a dubious one.

Nocturne both looks and feels a lot like its predecessor in terms of its focus on a tortured scion waging war against machiavellian, bloodsucking ghouls who fancy themselves undead gods who walk among mortal livestock. But while Nocturne could have easily settled and coasted on classic